COLORADO PLATEAU YIELDS ANOTHER NEW DINO SPECIES

Salt Lake Tribune

A team of scientists that includes Utah state paleontologist James Kirkland have identified a new dinosaur from a partial skull and other fossil bone fragments recovered in a 91-million-year-old formation in western New Mexico.

Jeyawati rugoculus appears to be a link between the iguanodon lineage and hadrosaurs, a highly evolved group of duck-billed dinosaurs that was abundant in North American during the closing chapters of the dinosaurs’ reign, according to findings published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Lead author Andrew McDonald, a doctoral student of paleontology at the University of Pennsylvania, believes this plant-eating creature roamed the western shore of what was once an inland seaway that cut North America in half during mid-Cretaceous era. McDonald authored the paper with Kirkland and Doug Wolfe as part of his senior thesis at the University of Nebraska.

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